"Halprin and Fetchpaw are relatively recent writers," said Tintinnabulum from the doorway. "The other two are older, we think-probably a century or so. We’ll leave you to your work, Miss Coldwine. If you should find anything that we want, anything by any of these writers not listed in the catalogs, please come to my vessel. It’s by the for’ard tip of Garwater, the Castor. I can assure you that anyone able to help us will be rewarded."

What do you know about me?thought Bellis anxiously as the door closed.

She sighed and looked at the paper again. Shekel looked over her shoulder and began, hesitantly, to say the names on the paper out loud.

Kruach Aum,Bellis read finally, ignoring Shekel’s slow progress through the syllables. How exotic, she thought sardonically, looking at the script, an archaic variant of Ragamoll. Johannes mentioned you. That’s a Kettai name.

Halprin and Fetchpaw each had books listed in the catalogs. Fetchpaw’s were volumes one and two of Against Benchamburg: A Radical Theory of Water. Halprin’s were Maritime Ecologies and The Biophysics of Brine.

Uhl-Hagd-Shajjer had a large number of works listed, Khadohi books apparently averaging little more than forty pages each. Bellis was familiar enough with the moon-writing alphabet to make out how the titles sounded, but she had no idea what they meant.

Of Kruach Aum there was nothing.

Bellis watched Shekel teaching himself to read, rifling through the sheets on which he had written difficult words, scribbling additions to them as he said their sounds, copying words from the papers around him, from files, from the list of names that Tintinnabulum had left her. It was as if the boy had once known how to read, and was now remembering.

At five o’clock he sat with her and went through The Courageous Egg. Shekel answered her questions about the egg’s adventures with a care that skirted the comic. She pronounced the words he did not know, syllable by slow syllable, guiding him through the confusions of silent or irregular letters. He told her he already had another book ready for her, that he had read in the library itself that day.

That night, for the first time, Bellis wrote in her letter about Silas Fennec. She mocked his pseudonym, but admitted that his company, his cocky edge, had been a relief after days of being alone. She continued to work her way through Johannes’ Essays on Beasts. She wondered whether Fennec would come by again, and when he did not, she went to bed in an irritated burst of boredom.

She dreamed, not for the first time, of the river journey to Iron Bay.

Tanner dreamed of being Remade.